An Eclectic Journal of Opinion, History, Poetry and General Bloviating

Sunday, January 31, 2016

American Dream Gone Sour—John O’Hara

John O'Hara at the time of his first success as a novelist at the age of 29.

John O’Hara was one of those
mid-century American novelists who
soared to fame and acclaim.But like a supernova his fame seems to have burnt out.In his day he was
as controversial as he was
famous.His defenders like John Updike compared him to Chekhov and wag Fran Lebowitz tagged him “The real F. Scott Fitzgerald.”But
many critics dismissed him as a hack turning out sensationalized pot boilers for a low brow audience.O’Hara
himself said simply, “Being a cheap,
ordinary guy, I have an instinct for
what an ordinary guy likes.”

Of
course O’Hara never really considered himself either cheap or ordinary.He spent a life time chaffing against the social
slights suffered as an outsider
on the edge of social respectability
and resenting that his father never
sent him to Yale.All of this became grist for his short stories
and novels, but also earned him a well-deserved
reputation as a needy social climber.

O’Hara
was born in Pottsville, Pennsylvania on January 31, 1905.The town,
90 miles northwest of Philadelphia,was in the heart of the state’s coalcountry on the banks of the Schuylkill
River.The river also provided power
for a textile industry that included
the Phillips Van Heusen Company of shirt fame.The mines and textile mills generated enough local nabobs to populate mansions in a swanky part of the otherwise grimy city.O’Hara’s physician
father grew rich enough to live there.But the O’Hara’s, Irish Catholics,
were excluded from polite society
tightly guarded by a WASP elite.Both father and son bitterly resented it.

John’s
father imbued him with the idea that if he went to Yale, it would be the ticket
to respectability and acceptance
both yearned for.In pursuit of that dream his father had high academic expectations for his son
and little tolerance for not meeting
them. He was sent to Niagara Prep in Lewiston, New Yorkwhere he was named class poet but was otherwise a lackluster
student. To teach the boy a lesson
of what life would be like without college, his dad sent him to work in the steel mills over summer breaks.John hated the humiliation even more than the back
breaking labor.

His
disappointed father felt he had not earned the right to attend Yale and refused
to send him.Moreover when the elder man
died shortly after John’s graduation and he left no provision in his will for his education.It was a bitter blow from which he literally never recovered, spending the rest of
his life pining for Yale and all it could have brought him.

Rather
than attend a lesser school which he
might be able to work his way through,
O’Hara went to work as a reporter on
the local Pottstown paper.Among his
assignments was covering the Pottsville
Maroons, the town’s short-lived
entry into the infant National
Football League.

But
he soon threw even that up, going, as he described it, “on the bum. I traveled out west, worked on a steamer, took a job in an amusement
park.”Great experience for a writer, but for
him a constant reminder that he had been “cheated” of a better life.

Eventually
O’Hara drifted to New York City determined
to become a writer.He took a cheap room and began writing.He supported himself with book and film reviews while concentrating on short stories. In 1928 the first of those stories appeared in the
still young New Yorker.He would
soon become a fixture in its pages,
publishing more than 200 stories in the magazine over the next decades.The stories featured a keen eye for the details of life
and sharp, believable dialogue.They were often set in a thinly veiled
version of Pottsville named Gibbsville and
chronicled the lives and foibles of
both the local elite and those who aspired to crash their party.

The stories were highly regarded and established O’Hara’s
reputation.They were even said to have
established the New Yorker style of short
story.Updike and other future
contributors like Saul Bellow were
directly in his debt.

The dusk jacket for the first edition of appointment in Samarra. Crosset& Dunlap was not considered a top-flight literary publisher like Scrivners, yet another disappointment for the author. It is best known today as the publisher of the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew books.

In 1934 O’Hara published his first novel, Appointment in Samarra which he had been working on for years.The novel describes how, over the course of three days, Julian English, the owner of the
Gibbsville Cadillac dealership and a
younger member of the WASP social clique, destroys himself with a series of impulsive acts, culminating in suicide. O’Hara never gives any obvious
cause or explanation for his behavior, which is apparently predestined by his
character.The novel was a critical—mostly—and popular success.No less than Ernest Hemingway enthused, “If you want to read a book by a man who
knows exactly what he is writing about and has written it marvelously well,
read Appointment in Samarra.”On the other hand Sinclair Lewis castigated the book as vulgar for it oblique but
frank sexual episodes.

What is left of O’Hara’s literary reputation today
rests on the short stories and this first novel.In 1998, long after the literary
establishment had turned on O’Hara, Modern
Library ranked Appointment
in Samarra 22nd on its list of the 100
best English-language novels of the 20th
century.As a result at least one
critic said its placement on the list “was used to ridicule the entire project.”Harsh.

Heady days at the Stork Club in New York O'Hara, left, with Ernest Hemingway and club owner Sherman Billinsgley.

If
contemporary critics thought O’Hara’s first book was vulgar, they hadn’t seen
anything yet.BUtterfield 8 was based
on a real life juicy scandal of speakeasy days when the dead body of a young woman named Starr Faithfull was found drown on Long Beach in Long Island.
She was shown to be a goodtime girl
of easy virtue who drank and partied too much.Her back
story even included a childhood
molestation by a former mayor of
Boston. O’Hara made her Gloria Wandrous and put her in a mutually destructive an obsessive relationship with—you guessed
it—a wealthy WASP.A classic O’Hara
story, according to one reviewer, in which he “He
plumbs the fault lines of society where the slumming rich meet with the
aspiring poor.”Of course the book had
plenty of juicy sex.

It is best known now for the
1960 film starring Elizabeth Taylor and
Laurence Harvey which took considerable liberties from the
book—including resetting it in
contemporary New York.But like the
novel, it sizzled with sex and won Taylor an Academy Award as Best Actress.

In 1940 O’Hara stitched
together a popular series of stories that he ran in the New Yorker about a second rate nightclub entertainer in Chicago, a certified heel and louse,
with big ambitions.Written in the form
a series of letters from Joey to his
much more successful pal Ted, Pal
Joey was more character study than story.

The Playbill for the 1940 Broadway production of Pal Joey, a triumph for O'Hara and the show that catapulted Gene Kelley to stardom.

Richard Rodgers and Lorenz
Hart inspired by the success of Porgy and Bess, which was based on a
gritty novel, were on the lookout for darker,
more serious material when they came
on O’Hara’s book.They enlisted the
author to write the script for a new kind of musical.The show Pal
Joey opened to acclaim in 1940, just months after the book hit the stores
with Gene Kelly in a star making turn in the lead.The show featured two great American standards, If
They Ask Me, I Could Write a Book and Bewitched, Bothered, and
Bewildered.It became the third longest running show of Rodgers
and Hart’s long collaboration.But it
was also controversial.Radio effectively banned playing songs from the show through most of the 1940’s
because of their frank lyrics.It was considered un-filmable in a Hollywood built on sunny, optimistic
musicals.

It was not until 17 years later that Pal Joey finally made it to the screen
in an adaptation staring Frank Sinatra,
Rita Hayworth, and Kim Novak and
featuring additional Rodgers and Hart songs cribbed from other shows, including My Funny Valentine.The play, now considered a landmark classic, has been revived
several times on Broadway and in London.

During World
War II O’Hara returned to journalism.He was a war
correspondent in the Pacific Theater,
although he would have preferred a gentleman’s
commission like the graduates of Ivy
League colleges received—or maybe an OSS
posting like so many old Yalies.

After the war he returned to New York more
confident in his own greatness as a writer on one hand and more than ever resentful
of what he believed was the back hand snubbing by the snooty aristocrats of
publishing and critical circles.The
more wounded he was, the harder he
tried to become one of them.He aped
their manners, style of dress, and distinctive
speech patterns.He studied and memorized trivia and minutia
about the Ivy schools and even the elite prep schools that fed them.He stalked
social gatherings.

But in perfect imitation of the self destructive
social climbers of his fiction, O’Hara only further alienated the closed club
he yearned to join.Then he would get belligerent.A leading critic referred to him simply as “a
well known lout.”The harder he tried, the harder the
critics—most of them—got on his work.

He continued to churn out novels—O’Hara was
nothing if not prolific—but most did
not catch on.Finally in 1955, the same
year his reputation was somewhat buoyed by the release of the film version of Pal Joey, he won a highly controversial National Book Award for Ten North
Fredrick,the story of Joe Chapin, an ambitious man who yearns
to become President and his long
suffering patrician wife, two rebellious children, and mistress.The book was made into a film in 1958
starring Gary Cooper.

O’Hara
had one more moderate success as a novelist before critics started simply
ignoring his work and the public stopped buying.In From the Terrace he painted a
picture of a young lawyer from a
family of small city aristocrats.His
mother has been driven to drink by a neglectful and distant father.His wife is socially ambitious, self-pitying,
and unfaithful.The man finds solace
with a young, tenderhearted exotic—read Jewish—do-gooder in the city. O’Hara himself wrote the screenplay for the
1960 film version starring Paul Newman,
JoanneWoodward, and Ina Balin.

Probably
contributing to O’Hara’s fading reputation as a novelist was his decision to
become a columnist with a weekly
book column, Sweet and Sour, for the Trenton
Times-Advertiser, and a biweekly column, Appointment with O’Hara,
for Collier’s magazine.In both venues he proved himself to
be, “simultaneously embarrassing and
infuriating in his vaingloriousness, vindictiveness, and general bellicosity.”He bemoaned never receiving any academic honors, despite his firm conviction
that he was the greatest living American
Novelist.He openly invited Yale to
finally recognize his genius.Yale
considered it groveling and did not deign to respond.

But he
still yearned for vindication. Privately, he told friends that he expected to
be the next American recipient of the Nobel
Prize.He wrote to his daughter “I
really think I will get it,” and “I want the Nobel prize... so bad I can taste
it.”It was not to be.The next American to win the prize for
literature was John Steinbeck in
1962.He could barely conceal his disappointment.

When
he took this act to a broader stage as a nationally syndicated columnist based at Newsday in 1964, O’Hara showed
himself to be not just a conservative,
but a viciousreactionary.Many young
writers had suffered the stings of class
prejudice. Most of them became liberals,
even radicals.Not O’Hara.Just as he assumed the proper suites and accents of the WASP elite, so
did he assume what he believed were the politics of the very richest barons of the boardroom and denizens of the old school clubs.

O'Hara as a reactionary curmudgeon and critic.

In his
first Newsday column O’Hara
proclaimed his willingness to spit in the eye of his critics: “Let’s get off to
a really bad start.” He endorsed Barry Goldwater for President claiming that he spoke for
the stolid fans of Lawrence Welk and blaming the downfall of the country on those who
loved the jazz of Black musicians like Lester Lanin and Dizzy Gillespie.Then he
railed at Martin Luther King’s Nobel
Prize.It was downhill from there,
week by week more antagonistic and outrageous.Papers started dropping the syndicated
feature.In 53 weeks Newsday canceled the column.

The
super rich graduates of his beloved Yale might have nodded approval, but the
literary establishment was notoriously liberal.The columns were like thumbs in
their eyes.O’Hara had successfully poisoned the well.

O’Hara
continued publishing to diminishing success.The last novel published during his life time was The Ewings in 1970.A sequel to that novel more came out
posthumously.Neither was successful.

O’Hara
died in Princeton, New Jersey, his longtime home, on April 13, 1970 at the
age of 65. Just to make sure that everyone knew just who he was, he had this inscription carved on his headstone,
“Better than anyone else, he told the truth about his time. He was a
professional. He wrote honestly and well.”The final hubris of Pal
Johnny.